That lesbian Covid-conscious bar is beyond a satirist’s wildest dreams

Guys, I just can’t do it anymore. On hearing about the woke lesbian bar that tried to run a Covid-mask-optional night once a week, I realised that my writing talents are simply not up to the task. Unfortunately, the English language does not provide adequate vocabulary to convey the demented depths to which the woke have plumbed. I retire.

The mind-melting story of the Last Ditch bar – a struggling hang-out for ‘dykes, transsexuals, gender freaks, workers and their friends’ – is the Final Boss of woke idiocy.

Here’s a recap, in case you missed the viral coverage. Three idealistic, gender-confused humans – one of them uses ‘it’ pronouns – decide to open a bar in the hyper-progressive Western Massachusetts town of Greenfield. Their target demographic? The misshapen, broke, hypochondriac, Sapphist ‘Covid cautious’ community. So far, so good, plenty of them about in these parts.

The founders said things like, ‘Poor and unhoused people are welcome in the space’ and ‘our mission is to create systems of care and action and aid’. They did not enforce the cover charge. They also had a ‘free store’ in which they kept fentanyl test strips, anti-overdose nasal sprays, food and clothes. They had a strict mask policy: everyone had to wear a KN-95 mask in the bar.

Despite this apparently winning formula, they failed to make enough money to pay their bills. Two of the three founders left months ago – one of them, to go into the famously lucrative clown industry via clown school. The remaining one, Jackie Matellian, got into debt, moved into her truck, took on four jobs and now uses the money she earns to pay down the bar’s bills. She consulted business advisers ‘who are queer and marginalised people of colour in the LGBT Chamber of Commerce’, as well as locals on how to save her bar. On their advice, she decided to open the doors – one measly night a week – to the Covid ‘mask-optional crowd’. The announcement, made on Instagram on 31 August, was greeted in the same way I imagine the Poles did upon hearing that Nazi tanks were headed their way. (No offence to the Poles.)

‘People like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience’, said one comment. ‘I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ableists’, went another.

Matellian swiftly moved to quell the mounting panic caused by the prospect of the new policy. She issued a statement apologising for the ‘passive and dismissive’ tone of the announcement, offering attempts at reassurance and promising that mediators will attend the bar’s next ‘community meeting’. This fails to pass the inclusivity test, however, because the Instagram post did not include alt-text for visually impaired followers.

According to the Boston Globe’s report, one particular ‘gender-expansive lesbian who goes by he / him pronouns’ decided to turn the Last Ditch mask debacle into a crusade. Soe Noire, the head of a ‘queer Covid-conscious collective in Western Massachusetts’ – who told the Globe ‘he’ (she) had been to the bar seven or eight times – decided that ‘he’ (she) would absolutely not stand for these mask-related horrors. ‘He’ (she) posted about the situation continuously for days. In one screed, ‘he’ (she) accused the bar of being aligned with ‘white-supremacist dystopia’ and claimed ‘airborne illness [was] going rapid’ and that the ‘next summer surge’ of Covid would be ‘right around the corner’. ‘He’ (she) posted this on 2 September, when Greenfield had not reported a single Covid case in more than two months.

The community meeting was held for both in-person and Zoom attendees on 11 September. Podcaster Katie Herzog obtained a recording of the three-hour-plus struggle session and played clips of it on her show, Blocked and Reported. It is one of the funniest things I have ever heard. One mediator tells the group that she is a licensed therapist, prompting the panicked comment:

'Are we to understand that we now have a professional relationship with this licensed therapist? Do we have confidentiality? Are we subject to mandated reporting or hospitalisations based on the content of our communication?'

Thankfully, Herzog reports, there is a voice teacher present ‘with somatic regulation experience’, who ‘invites them to do some breath work, which definitely helps reset the vibe’.

Another attendee, a person by the name of Yams – a ‘gender fluid, racially ambiguous, black biracial, a mom, low income’ – offered some real talk: ‘Nobody is owed comfort on land in which rape and pillage has happened.’

Not surprisingly, Soe Noire features heavily in the struggle session as well. ‘I’m rescinding all my monetary support from now on’, ‘he’ (she) huffs. And then issues the demand: ‘Pay me.’

There is not a single comedian or satirist on Earth who could come up with a better parody of woke. Yet however much we might laugh, this lunatic fringe is not exactly fringe any longer. The obsessions these ladies demonstrate – with disability, with Covid, with queerness – have made their way into the bloodstream of the body politic through an increasingly influential Democratic Socialists of America and an increasingly radicalised cohort of downwardly mobile, overeducated and unemployable children of elites. It was only two weeks ago that I was writing about the socialist conference that damned GLP-1s, fitness and even healthcare as fascist. And yet, here we are, once again.

These people take themselves very seriously. We should take them seriously as well.